With tears in his eyes, Wilson Ramos, a catcher for the Washington Nationals professional baseball team in the US, embraced his rescuers and said he had wondered whether he would survive a kidnapping ordeal that ended when Venezuelan commandos swept into his captors' mountain hideout.

Ramos said he was thankful to be alive and described his "hair-raising" final moments as a prisoner during the rescue on Saturday, when soldiers exchanged heavy gunfire with the kidnappers in the remote area where he was being held.

He said his kidnappers had carefully planned the abduction and told him they were going to demand a large ransom.

"I didn't know if I was going to get out of it alive," Ramos told reporters at a police station in his hometown of Valencia, flanked by police investigators, national guard commanders and the country's justice minister, Tareck El Aissami. "It was very hard for me. It was very hard for my family."

El Aissami said the authorities had arrested four of the captors, all of them Venezuelan men in their 20s. A 60-year-old woman and a 74-year-old man were also arrested as accomplices for supplying the kidnappers with food, he said.

The six suspects were led past journalists at the police station with black hoods over their heads.

The authorities were still searching for at least four Colombian men who escaped during the rescue, El Aissami said. He did not say whether anyone was wounded in the gun battle.

Ramos, 24, was seized at gunpoint outside his mother's home in Valencia, 90 miles from Caracas, on Wednesday night and taken away in a 4x4. It was the first known kidnapping of a Major League Baseball player in Venezuela, and the abduction set off a series of candlelit vigils and public prayers at stadiums as well as outside Ramos's house.

El Aissami said investigators' first break in the case came when they found the kidnappers' stolen Chevrolet vehicle abandoned in the town of Bejuma alongside the mountains of central Carabobo state.

With that location pinpointed, he said, they studied past crimes in the area and ended up checking on a rural house that authorities believed had been used in a previous kidnapping.

A 4x4 parked outside had mud on it even though there was no mud in the area, El Aissami said.

Investigators suspected that the vehicle was being used to shuttle food to another spot nearby, and eventually determined the house was probably being used by the kidnappers as a support base while holding Ramos elsewhere.

El Aissami said authorities took over the house and detained the couple who had been cooking for the abductors.

Once investigators thought they had found the general area where Ramos might be, President Hugo Chávez personally authorised an aerial search mission and teams also set out on foot in the mountainous area, El Aissami said.

Teams searched most of the day on Friday and finally came upon the remote house where Ramos was being held.

Chavez followed the operation "minute by minute," the justice minister said.

more on this story

Venezuelan police rescued Wilson Ramos and arrested six people in connection with his kidnap. The 24-year-old Washington Nationals catcher had been kidnapped outside his mother's home during an off-season visit to central Venezuela